Reliving and Affirming Trauma in Mahesh Bikram Shah’s Chhapamarko Chhoro

Abstract

This research divulges historical trauma of the main characters in Mahesh Bikram Shah's collection of short stories entitled Chhapamarko Chhoro. The stories disclose mini-narratives which consist in multiple kinds of sufferings undergone by Nepalese people from different walks of life during decade-long insurgency but are eclipsed by the grand-narratives like democracy, freedom, identity etc. supposedly upheld by the warring forces. These traumatic experiences felt at many levels- personal, social, cultural, economic and political- have stemmed from a sense of severe loss disguised in various forms of physical and mental violence. This sense of loss causes historical trauma which is acted-out once triggered by any stimulation that reminds the original catastrophic event and is worked-through if acknowledged and adapted to the wheel of life. The research explores the acting-out and working-through of the trauma. It argues that Shah's choice of not showing literal devastation of war is to depict the traumatized state of victims' psyche which bears greater intensity and tells more intricate aspects of shocks than could have been possible otherwise.